Dear Debilyn: I know the love you have for your animals is incredible and that you are a strong and worthwhile person. I think it is very very difficult to watch someone we love destroying themselves. My younger sister is an alcoholic. Her alcoholic thinking has progressed over the years. Now she lives in complete la la land about our parents. She makes up wonderful parents. What a bit of etahanol can do for the brain.  I feel very very very sad when I see pictures of her that show she is yellow and haggard and shrunken.  I also know that she had many many options of treatment and she can't take them.  I know I have felt incredibly responsible for her my whole life. I have even felt scared that one of her sons has some fetal alcohol syndrome issue.  But it is all out of my hands. I cannot turn my life over to fix her when I have my own issues to deal with.

I hope you can turn some of that fierce, tender, compassionate love towards yourself and your issues and your grief and your sadness and your entitled rage.  I think it is very very normal to be furious when someone who is intelligent, creative and has many good attributes decides to destroy themselves. But how will destroying myself too make it right?

I mourn for you and rage for you but at the same time I admire your tenancity and your passion very very much.  I know that that passion for love, animals, creativity and a home (how we never get a home with an A do we - its a war zone day and night).  How we never ever get it.

Maresie.